The Danger of Rewriting History in Afghanistan

Wazhma Frogh, Afghanistan country director former country director for Global Rights* recently published a long column in the Washington Post titled “Risking a Rights Disaster.” In it, she argues that a US shift to a narrow counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan, or attempts to bring some Taliban into the government, would spell disaster for Afghanistan’s civilians, especially women.

Frogh’s piece is earnest, and she makes some good points, but I still found myself cringing in a few places. To begin with, this paragraph:

    In 2001, when the war in Afghanistan began, the liberation of Afghan women was one of the most important justifications for military intervention. Has the world now changed its mind about Afghan women? Is it ready to let them once again be killed and tortured by militants? Does the world no longer believe in the principles it supported in 2001?

And then this one:

    The question to keep in mind for all parties involved is, what motivated them to come to Afghanistan in the first place? The answer: global security and the protection of human rights in Afghanistan. Are these two purposes no longer valid?

OK. Here's where we run into trouble. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was not launched to liberate Afghanistan’s women, or to stop the Taliban’s human rights abuses. The Taliban were not overthrown because they were repressive, misogynistic, genocidal, and had no intention of providing basic services to the millions at their mercy. They were overthrown because they allowed Al Qaeda to set up shop and plan a deadly terrorist attack on a member of NATO.

Greater assistance to Afghan women was a byproduct of the invasion, not a rationale for it. During their time in power, the Taliban placed tight restrictions on how relief organizations could interact with Afghan women. These restrictions were so extreme that many foreign NGOs and even some UN agencies pulled out of the country, because they simply could not abide by the Taliban's rules and still serve their beneficiaries. With the removal of the Taliban from power in late 2001, aidworkers could assist previously unreachable Afghans.

But, again, the welfare of Afghan women was not part of the US government's rationale for deposing the Taliban militarily. If the Taliban regime had been overthrown for genuinely humanitarian reasons, it would have gone down three years earlier, in the summer of 1998, at the height of the Taliban's ethnically-motivated massacres and punishing humanitarian blockade of the central highland region. Back then, the only country seriously considering overthrowing the Taliban was Iran.

Intentions matter, in war probably more than anything else. Intentions set priorities and boundaries. When the United States overthrew the Taliban, it empowered Afghanistan’s most infamous warlords, men responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents, with values were no more liberal than the Taliban’s --on gender or anything else. Many of these men were allowed to seize, or were handed, positions of power. They have skillfully undermined indigenous attempts to advance women's rights ever since.

I don't doubt Frogh's sincerity. She obviously wants to believe the United States cares about Afghan lives, but promoting a distorted history of the recent past is risky. If the effect of foreign involvement in Afghanistan since 2001 is to be evaluated –and make no mistake, many people, including international development critics, are evaluating– it should be evaluated based on a clear, unsentimental understanding of what was done, and why. Mistakes that are not understood will be repeated. The who is also important. Not recognizing the multiplicity of actors and motivations at work in Afghanistan does a disservice to the women and men, Afghan and foreign, who have thrown themselves into the reconstruction for principled reasons. The United Nations Assistance Mission is not the International Security Assistance Force is not the US Agency for International Development is not Oxfam is not the International Center for Transitional Justice. Conflating them makes no sense, yet many otherwise intelligent people do this regularly. Understand: this tactic is most useful to those who label Afghanistan (and, implicitly, Afghans) a "lost cause."

Afghanistan is at a critical juncture. Military and diplomatic decisions that will steer Afghanistan's course from here are being debated in Washington and London and Brussels and Kabul as I type this. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was not a humanitarian intervention, but humanitarian aims can still be prioritized, and should be. Ultimately, this is Frogh's point, and she articulates it with more urgency than I ever could.

    Bearing in mind how fragile the Afghan government is at this moment, it will not take long for the country's women to come under attack again. The consequences will be even more bitter this time because no matter how limited our success, we have at least managed to act in the forefront of public life in Afghanistan. We have had a taste of what it's like to have rights.